Conventional remote sensing classification techniques model the data in each class with a multivariate Gaussian distribution. Inadequacy of such algorithms stems from Gaussian distribution assumption for the class-component densities, which is only an assumption rather than a demonstrable property of natural spectral classes. In this paper, we present an Independent Component Analysis (ICA) based approach for unsupervised classification of multi/hyperspectral imagery. ICA employed for a mixture model, estimates the data density in each class and models class distributions with non-Gaussian structure (i.e. leptokurtic or platykurtic p.d.f.), formulating the ICA mixture model (ICAMM). It finds independent components and the mixing matrix for each class, using the extended information-maximization learning algorithm, and computes the class membership probabilities for each pixel. We apply the ICAMM for unsupervised classification of images from a multispectral sensor - Positive Systems Multi-Spectral Imager, and a hyperspectral sensor - Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS). Four feature extraction techniques: Principal Component Analysis, Segmented Principal Component Analysis, Orthogonal Subspace Projection and Projection Pursuit have been considered as a preprocessing step to reduce dimensionality of the hyperspectral data. The results demonstrate that the ICAMM significantly outperforms the K -means algorithm for land cover classification of remotely sensed images.© (2003) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.